Dermot Staveacre obituary

In 1982 Dermot Staveacre went into treatment for his alcoholism and managed to turn his life around

My brother, Dermot Staveacre, who has died aged 76, overcame his own alcoholism to become an addiction counsellor to others, both in the UK and in his adopted home of Portugal, where he set up a recovery centre.

Born in Buxton, Derbyshire, to Edward Staveacre, a stockbroker, and his wife, Felicity (nee Daly), who was originally from Ireland, Dermot boarded at Downside school, Somerset, before studying economics at Queens’ College, Cambridge.

In his younger days, Dermot Staveacre was a party animal, mixing with people such as David Frost, Barry Took and Ronnie Barker

He graduated in 1963 and started a career in computer sales, sharing a house on the Portobello Road, London, with me, the comedian and actor Tim Brooke-Taylor, and another friend, Mary Battersby. David Frost, Graeme Garden, Marty Feldman, Barry Took and Ronnie Barker were regular visitors to the house, with Marty even borrowing Dermot’s name for a Round the Horne script, because he thought it sounded hilarious: “Introducing Dermot Staveacre and René – thrills and spills on the mighty bacon-slicer,” was Kenneth Horne’s opening announcement, when he listed the make-believe guests for that edition. This was the early 1960s, and Dermot, who was always a party animal, became an alcoholic.

He was in a desperately fragile state when he was persuaded to go into treatment at Broadway Lodge, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, in 1982, but in doing so, he managed to turn his life around.

After recovery, he trained at Clouds House in Warminster, Wiltshire, to qualify as an addiction counsellor, in 1984. He returned to Broadway Lodge as a counsellor, and was then invited to set up one of the first addiction recovery centres of its kind in Portugal, in Castelo Branco, a remote city high in the mountains in the centre of the country, by the Knights of the Order of Malta, a Catholic charitable organisation.

Dermot undertook a six-week advisory secondment there, which led to him being invited to stay on as director general of the centre. He took on this challenge in 1993, learned the language, imported his dog, Sally, and worked there for eight years.

He then moved to the Algarve, and continued to work as a freelance addiction counsellor, prison visitor and bingo caller in a care home that he helped to fund in the village of Pera, where he lived.

He became a much-loved uncle to my two children, Dominic and Pippa, and a genuinely great-uncle to their four boys, whose visits to Pera were always a welcome adventure. Dermot is also survived by our sister, Vicki, and me.